with every drop of blood by james lincoln collier

And not a minute too soon, neither, for I wasn’t more than a quarter mile into the woods when I heard the Yankee horses clattering over the stones on the wagon trail, and the sounds of somebody shouting orders. While I was harnessing them, Ma and the little ones, Sarah and Sam, threw everything they could lay their hands on into the wagon, and about five minutes later I was heading up High Top, across Hawksbill Creek, and into the woods above. One of the Reamer boys from down at Conrad’s Store raced up to warn us that the Yankees were on their way.

We never thought they’d come up onto our mountain, for our soil was thin and our crops not near as rich as down in the valley. A crow would have to carry his own dinner if he was to fly across the Shenandoah Valley then. For months General Sheridan’s bluecoats had been ranging up and down the valley, taking what they could carry off and destroying the rest-slaughtering our cattle and sheep, burning down our mills and whole barns full of corn and hay. The Southern army needed an awful lot of food every day and counted on the Shenandoah Valley to produce a good deal of it. The soil in the valley was rich and the crops always good-the barns busting out with corn, wheat, and hay, the cattle and hogs sleek and fat.

The Shenandoah Valley was about as hard hit as any place during the war. He said it helped to stiffen his spine for the fighting to be near home, for he knew he was defending his own people-his own family, when you got down to it. If he had to get shot, it was good it happened nearby, for he didn’t have far to travel to get home. Pa got shot at a place called Cedar Creek, which wasn’t more than forty miles from our house halfway up the side of High Top Mountain. He wasn’t exactly sure how many, for it had been some time since he’d read about it in the newspapers, but it was way up there. Hundreds of thousands of them dead, Pa said. But before he did we had a lot of time to talk about why he had to get himself shot-what the war was about and why so many people had to get killed in it. When they brought Pa home from the war all shot up, he said he might die, and he did, too.

With every drop of blood by james lincoln collier